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To much dismay, it doesn't look like AMD will be sending out any review/engineering samples of any Bulldozer processors to Phoronix. Evidently they don't care too much about Linux coverage for this less-than-stellar product launch. Scheiße!

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it only wins in tasks that can be heavily multithreaded, and it's not very power effective.

FX processors based on Bulldozer microarchitecture managed to show their strengths only in a small variety of common user tasks. There are very few popular applications, which would generate simple multi-threaded integer load and this is the only case when Bulldozer really performs at its best. As a result, in certain applications the new Bulldozer is not just slower than competitors from Intel, but is even slower than the previous-generation Phenom II X6. And it means that AMD didn’t succeed in launching a revolutionary desktop CPU.

In fact, FX is just another Phenom, which looks pretty good especially compared with the predecessors. Overall, FX processors are faster than Phenom II, they overclock much better and consume slightly less power, so they will be a good replacement for the CPUs on old K10 microarchitecture.

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An analysis of why the bulldozer is the best cpu amd could build:
The question is why they have doubled the integer units to 8cores and the floadingpoint and (SSE) SIMD units are only 4core the answer is simple:

Intel always use the "the instruction set war" against AMD (SSE) SIMD the intel's command set always used by intel cpus first and 2-3 years later the competitor can use it at the first time.

the bulldozer is in FMA4 and VXA incompatibility never ever gotten a code snippet from the intel compiler because the amd FMA4 and VXA are not bit compatible and because why? intel force them to be not compatible.

Intel always make it so the last 20-30 years so a 3-4 year old technology for the competitors in real intel only will give max SSE4.2 to amds bulldozer

so why amd is now worth as much to integer units?

is simple because the instruction set of the integer units since the 486s and the 64 bit extension more or less the same without chances.

amd can deliver the integer performance of Intel compilers to the customer against the will of Intel.

Now who says the bulldozer was a bad CPU simply has no plan of the market situation and policies of the Intel instruction set

intel play this game on sse2 vs sse3 at gemcht and sse3 vs SSE4.1 and SSE4.2 vs sse3 this means amd always lose on SIMD.

only in integer performance, they can not
because it is "real" computing power without any fake cheat logic

if you look at the benchmark 7zip on bulldozer has the cpu is clever and genius !

Also, gentoo seems to still be on gcc 4.5. I'd like to see another comparison with gcc 4.6 (with "-Ofast -march=native" on both configurations!) as well as maybe Open64 (and for the sake of comparing: path64).

Final question:
This patch for bulldozer in the kernel, that linus was upset about in the beginning: is it in 3.0? 3.1?

Also, gentoo seems to still be on gcc 4.5. I'd like to see another comparison with gcc 4.6 (with "-Ofast -march=native" on both configurations!) as well as maybe Open64 (and for the sake of comparing: path64).

Final question:
This patch for bulldozer in the kernel, that linus was upset about in the beginning: is it in 3.0? 3.1?

You're not the only one. I wanted to compare a few CPUs and see how fast they compile. I was not really able to find how to do this. Michael you should really work on that guy a bit IMO.

As for the mean things towards Phoronix I really don't get them. I like the news here and yes the reviews I have seem could have been a bit better but this probably is just one of the few review sites for Linux. The only one that does Linux reviews in English that I know of in fact. So yeah AMD could have sent a Bulldozer. Anyway it's not like I care. I'm still going to support AMD because left alone Intel mean big trouble, already their prices are way off the scale, if they get to dominate even more ... it won't be good.
I don't feel Bulldozer is worth buying right now. One of the old Phenoms yes, they have very good prices and perform decently.